


semantics

by audries



Category: Cheers (TV)
Genre: F/M, plane scene who i only know one last big office fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26580106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audries/pseuds/audries
Summary: Diane scowls. “We’ve already had this argument.”“We’ve already had every argument.”
Relationships: Diane Chambers/Sam Malone
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	semantics

This is familiar: his hand between Diane’s sharp shoulder blades as he propels her into the office. This, too, once they’re squirreled away, facing off: the gradual upward arc of her chin as she grows not angrier, not exactly, but more self-righteous. More certain of all his various shortcomings, maybe. Of her ability to primly catalog and rattle them off, like she’s doing now, and to not fall victim to a single one of them herself.

“You don’t have to be so smug about it, Diane, you know?” he says. “I hate it when you’re smug. You’re always smug.”

“You always say ‘You’re always smug,’” she snaps. “And I am not! I’m right, and you’re wrong, and you don’t like it. That makes me smarter than you not,” a sluggish affectation he guesses is supposed to be an imitation of him, “ _smug_.” She flicks a hand in his direction to dismiss the sentence.

Yes, he thinks, this too. The same. Her incidental gawkiness. The nervous twitch, gone full-bodied. A glimpse of Sumner’s old clinger-on, naive, too good, scaredy-cat Diane. But then of course Sam had always been so afraid of her.

“Besides,” Diane sniffs, idly handling the stapler on his desk. “You don’t know what I always am anymore. We don’t qualify for ‘always.’ We barely deserve the present tense, Sam." ” The stapler set back down with a little metal snap. "You might have more rightly said I _was_ always smug. But you still would have been wrong, because I am not.” She frowns at him. “Wasn’t.”

“You always do this. You always make it about semantics instead of about what’s really going on!”

A mild blink. “Semantics,” she murmurs, the same way she had said _sex addiction therapy?_ the night before, with a kind of a sanded-down edge in it that he can’t quite place.

“Yeah, semantics.”

He would like to hear the measured tone from her again, so he could try and figure out what she means by it. But it seems just as like to be pity as anything else. So he says: “I mean, you still can’t shut up. I bet you couldn’t shut up for ten seconds if you tried.”

Diane scowls. “We’ve already had this argument.”

“We’ve already had every argument.”

This is the part where she should ask what they’re doing. _That_ would be familiar. But she hadn’t asked it yet—not over coffee at Melville’s, not last night at his apartment, or this morning at her hotel. It had unsettled him, to have everything be so much the same, to have her be so Diane, in every way he had despised and adored, and to have her not ask it. It lent a silence to everything they said to each other. Even though, for the last half hour, at least since everyone made their displeasure over their renewed engagement so brutally obvious, they had been exceedingly loud.

“No,” Diane says. “I mean we’ve had exactly this argument. You don’t remember? You were wearing a watch, then.” She steps away from his desk. It is so strange to see her in the office. Mostly because of how not strange it is. Her fingers on his wrist, pulling it up to her eye level. “You timed me.” She smiles. “I couldn’t.”

He swallows. “You couldn’t?”

“Shut up for ten seconds.” She laughs. “You really don’t remember?”

He remembers. Isn’t that what all of this has been about? The whole time? Since the beginning? Never being able to forgive or forget anything?

“You couldn’t shut up, uh, long enough to kiss me.”

“Yes.” She drops his wrist. “I always overthink this, Sam. You and I.”

“No shit, sweetheart. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Well, you’re saying it wrong.” Her infuriating chin again. “That’s your problem, Sam. It’s not _what_ you’re saying it’s that you’re always saying the exact right thing exactly wrong.”

“Don’t ‘always’ me!” He points like she’s might not realize he’s talking to her. Like he’s ever talking, especially like this, to anyone else. “If you ‘always’ me, Diane, I swear to God, we’re through. I’ll send you packing, lady. I don’t care if you have to spend the night on the street! I don’t care if you get kidnapped and shipped off to Timbuktu. I don’t care about last night, or California, or that I for some reason thought, after six years, I might want to see you again. That we might finally have something not dumb to say to each other. If the next word out of your mouth is ‘always,’ I swear, I will--" He lapses a moment in thinking about what he might do; this, too, has always been their problem. What's going to hurt her the most but not too much? What's going to keep her away from him but, you know, not all the way away, not too far? "I will _never speak to you again._ I’ll come to L.A., and I will take a vow of silence, and I will follow you around and never say a word to you, until you die. And it. Will drive you. Nuts. I promise. I’m serious as a fucking heart attack here. I will make you insane if you make me insane. By saying ‘always.’ Right now.”

Diane looks at him right on the level. Brings her chin back down to earth. He knows she’s gonna say it before she even starts to open her mouth. He knew before she knew, probably. Her big blue eyes; her spiny stubbornness. He hates her. God, he had missed her.

Diane breathes in. She says, “Alw—“

“God _damn_ it!” He lunges for her, clapping a hand over her mouth, that fucking chin. “Diane! I said don’t say it!”

This is familiar: plummeting off some precipice toward total humiliation with his arms around one Diane Chambers, trying to figure out if the next inane dare they were both too stubborn not to act on was going to be to crash land or to loosen up and pull the parachute.

Diane makes a kind of hysterical sound behind his hand. At first, he thinks she is trying to bite him, which would be absurd but also not. They used to scrap around. Diane strangely boyish, for all her skirts and natural sweetness, unafraid of getting her hands dirty. But she’s baring her teeth at a different angle, muffled behind his hand. Is she--

“Are you _laughing_?” 

She _is_ laughing. Hard and sincere. She is laughing _oh Sam!_ and laughing _oh, good God._ Her hand over his against her mouth, pressing and then pulling away. Uncovered, suddenly, it’s infectious, her laughter. He falls to pieces with her.

“Oh my god!”

“The two of us!”

“Unbelievable!”

What’s worse is how believable it is, but he doesn’t say this, lets the laughter tear him up instead, covering his eyes. “What a pair,” he hiccups. “Oh, Christ. What are we arguing about?”

“I was hoping you knew!”

He laughs until his chest feels bruised with it, an ache meant to remind him he is too old for anything that could be qualified as _antics_. He keeps his hand over his eyes, stumbles back to sit on the floor, because why not? He wonders what time it is. “Are you—“ he catches his breath, sobering. “Are you as tired as I am?”

The sound goes out of Diane’s laughter, slowly like air from a balloon, until she’s mostly just breathing hard. She could be crying. He doesn’t look. A kind of squeak from the direction of his desk chair.

“More,” Diane says. He slides his hand away from his eyes.

She isn’t crying. She is slumped, heels kicked up against the floor. She looks exhausted. She reaches out a hand without really moving in his direction, and it’s almost too far to grab without standing up, but he makes it.

“I missed you,” she says.

He nods up at her. “Me, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

She winces a little. “For what I said earlier. About your hair, especially. That was uncalled for.”

“Damn right.”

“ _Sam_.” She squeezes his hand, shaking it side to side, then lets it go. She drops back into the chair. “God. How did we use to do this all the time?”

“We were younger.” They hadn’t even been so young. But they’d been children somehow, still. “Better stamina.”

“Something like that.”

“I think, uh,” he sits up, groaning, then stands slow, paying special attention to his knees, so he doesn’t have to look at her. “I think sometimes I was afraid to stop. You know? It’s stupid. I thought if we stopped fighting—“

“I would leave.” Diane nods. “It’s not stupid. I sometimes think I was afraid of the same thing.”

“Yeah.” He reaches out a hand to pull her up from the chair. “It’s stupid because you left anyway, I guess.”

“I did.”

He would still rather not look at her, but he brings her a little closer, hands on her waist. She sounds as old as he’d expected her to over the phone last week, all of the sudden. As old as he’d been gratified to find she was and wasn’t. She sounds as ready as he is for it to be over-and somehow still just as unprepared.

“And you’re going to leave again now.” He feels her intake of breath because his hands rise and fall with it. “Aren’t ya?”

Now she is crying, or close to it, he’s pretty sure. But she sounds steady enough when she says, “I am.”

He kisses her temple. He’s not angry with her. This is familiar. “You always do.”

She pushes him away so he has to look her in the eye. He guesses that’s fair. Although he doesn’t know what fair looks like between him and Diane. Last time they’d said goodbye she hadn’t even said it. He’d rather she not say it now. Just for the sake of consistency. For the way the familiarity of it will hit him a little like nostalgia. Like an old bruise. 

She looks at him glassy-eyed but dead-on. She says, “Sam—“ and he holds up a hand.

“You don’t have to say anything, alright?” He touches the tops of her shoulders, gentle. “I’ll see you around, huh, Ms. Chambers? You’ll let me know if you ever need a job?”

Diane grins. Sometimes she could be so...so right there with him. It made him want to ask her to come back, and she wasn’t even gone yet.

“Here?” she laughs a little. The sound is at odds with the mess slowly being made of her mascara. “What makes you think I would ever work here?”

He has always hated it when she cries. Has always worried about her, the girl who got left in his bar. Who was going to bound up those steps and into the world beyond them—which was big and bad and didn't know her like he did, didn't realize how easy and how hard she would be to hurt.

He shrugs, distracted by the tightness in his throat. “Uh, it’s a good place to work. The people are good.”

“It is,” Diane says. She brings her hands to his jaw and kisses him once, firmly, finally. “They are, Sam. They always have been.”

And then she is at the door, and he is doing what he has always done, turning after her. Saying, “Diane—wait. Hang on a second.”

She stops. She does what she has always done, too. She turns back to look at him as if from very far away, and she waits patiently for him to say the exact right thing, at the exact right time.

He never has. “I—“

He opens his mouth and shuts it. Aw, hell. This familiar. He tries a little intake of breath, shoves his hand deep in his pockets. “Diane, I—“ He shakes his head. No good. She is smiling at him, head tilted, fond. Now she looks too young. She looks like every fight they’ve ever had, and every reconciliation, standing there at his office door, with her foot on the threshold. There is nowhere in this bar that he loves so much that he hadn’t loved Diane more—and worse, and somehow longer, even though it had been less time.

Once more, with feeling: “I just feel like I should tell you, I still. I always. I—“ He practically wheezes. Like a smoker. It’s no good. Everything the same, the two of them as bad and as wonderful as they’d ever been. He’s still not going to be able to say it. 

He offers her a tight smile instead. A helpless little shrug. He opens his mouth, and the silence holds fast. He waits for her to talk it out. Or to frown at him. He waits for her to say _What are we doing?_  
  
But she only drops her chin to her chest and breathes before she looks back up and through him. She only says, “Oh, Sam. Me too.”

And then she is gone so completely into the unexpected quiet, even the click of the door and her heels fading out too fast, that it is almost like she never was back at all.

**Author's Note:**

> i love the cheers finale, but i simply think it is a travesty that sam and diane didn't get to indulge one last time in their shared love language: fighting with each other for absolutely no reason at all


End file.
